Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough eBook

So far everything is quite ordinary. The game
is over, the ball is lost, and you prepare to go.
But you decide to go home by a rather roundabout way
that brings you by the spot that you have scoured in
vain. You are not going to search for the ball.
That would simply put the creature up to some new
artifice. No, you are just walking round that
way accidentally. What so natural as that you
should have your eyes on the ground? And there,
sure enough, lies the ball, taken completely unaware.
It is so ridiculously obvious that to say that it
was lying there when you were looking for it so industriously
is absurd. It simply couldn’t have been
there. You suspect that if after your search,
instead of going on with the play you had hidden behind
the hedge and watched, you would have seen the creature
come out from its hole.

I do not expect to have my theory that the golf-ball
has an intelligence accepted. The mystery is
explicable, I am told, on the doctrine of the “fresh
eye.” You look for a thing so hard that
you seem to lose the faculty of vision. Then
you forget all about it and find it. The experience
applies to all the operations of the mind. If
I get “stuck” in writing an article I
go and do a bit of physical work, ride a bicycle or
merely walk round the garden, and the current flows
again. Or you have a knotty problem to decide.
You think furiously about it all day and get more hopelessly
undecided the longer you think. Then you go to
bed, and you wake in the morning with your mind made
up. Hence the phrase, “I will sleep on it.”
It is this freshness of the vision, this faculty of
passive illumination, that Wordsworth had in mind
when he wrote:

Think you, ’mid all
this mighty sum
Of things for
ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will
come,
But we must still
be seeking?

And yet I cannot quite get rid of my fancy that the
golf ball does enjoy the game.

ON A PRISONER OF WAR

There are still a few apples on the topmost branches
of the trees in the orchard. They are there because
David, the labourer, who used to come and lend us
a hand in his odd hours—­chiefly when the
moon was up—­is no longer available.
You may remember how David opened his heart to me about
enlisting when he stood on the ladder picking the pears
last year. He did not like to go and he did not
like to stay. All the other chaps had gone, and
he didn’t feel comfortable like in being left
behind, but there was his mother and his wife and
his Aunt Jane, and not a man to do a hand’s turn
for ’em or to dig their gardens if he went.
And there was the allotment—­that ’ud
run to weeds. And ...